Author
Topic: what is evolution anyway? (Read 9567 times)

Zip, your arguments are a good example of starting with an unproved premise. i honestly don't care what you believe, but we all should recognize that what we believe is based on a starting foundation. self checking is important in science, belief systems, and life in general.

the questions of how? and why (not)? are the basis for all advancement in thought and society. only man has the ability to engage in this kind of thinking and sadly, we waste the skill more often than not.

Zip.....

I saw this and thougnt of you :roll:

"There are two ways to by fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to accept what is true"

Soren Kierkegaard

"Never argus with stupid people,they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience."

Mark Twain

BEE HAPPY Jim 134 :)

« Last Edit: April 12, 2012, 05:59:03 PM by Jim 134 »

Logged

"Tell me and I'll forget,show me and I may remember,involve me and I'll understand" Chinese Proverb

"The farmer is the only man in our economy who buys everything at retail, sells everything at wholesale, and pays the freight both ways." John F. KennedyFranklin County Beekeepers Association MA. http://www.franklinmabeekeepers.org/

THIS WILL BE MY LAST POST IN THIS COFFEE SHOP!I WARNED zippelk THIS PLACE WAS FULL OF OSTRICHES AND PEOPLE THAT LOVED TO ARGUE!

JOHN: You have got a wonderful forum here (THANK YOU). I believe it would be much better one; if you pulled the plug on, 'The Coffee House'.I respect YOUR opinion, but there are others that send me to the Roliads bottle. Ken: Keep up the good work!

Ray,I know the ride gets bumpy sometimes,but the coffee house does tend to help keep this stuff out of the other sections of the forum. I have taken a break at different times and concentrate on other areas of the forum.Election years are extremely tough,but as long as we don't let people get too far out of order,it usually works out.I understand where you are coming from completely,believe me!! :lol:

Let me say this,disagreeing with an idea or idealogy is not the same as calling someone perhaps a little less intelligent by name.As you did in the post I mentioned.Arrogance comes to mind.And as far as everything in the universe having come from nothing,a creator is no less plausible than a big bang of nothing coming from nowhere being everything.Perhaps our creator made a few of us think we all came from ooze,maybe that was his idea of a sense of humour.Oh I pray that there's a heaven and I hope there ain't no hell.

Hey Ray, don’t leave the coffee shop! I can’t be the only liberal left to fight the good fight against our conservative friends :( You and I happen to disagree on this topic, but we sure agree on most other ones. People weren’t all created/evolved from the same cookie cutter, so we have to expect some raspberries with our oatmeal.

quite a shout out for something you don't care about. to be fair, i may not have been clear about to whom i was directing my reply, but ray, i don't care what you believe either. you are free to believe as you wish. isn't that a great thing? as i believe i said earlier, life would be boring if we all believed the same.

to bad that you don't want to engage, but i do understand. it's not for everyone and those who find debate distasteful should probably not do it.

BlueBee, raspberries in oatmeal are very good. it's the rocks in your split pea that are pretty bad ;)

Logged

.....The greatest changes occur in their country without their cooperation. They are not even aware of precisely what has taken place. They suspect it; they have heard of the event by chance. More than that, they are unconcerned with the fortunes of their village, the safety of their streets, the fate of their church and its vestry. They think that such things have nothing to do with them, that they belong to a powerful stranger called “the government.” They enjoy these goods as tenants, without a sense of ownership, and never give a thought to how they might be improved.....

CERN the particle accelerator sent a series of signals exactly 812 miles and it arrived (measured by atomic clocks) FASTER than the speed of light - they now are scrabbling to explain whether particles can exceed the unthinkably unbreakable speed of light or was there errors in the distance measuring? If it is the prior, than all Einsteinium theory and physics as we know it is out the window and needs to start over.

Zippelk you say the simplest life form today has about 160,000 base pairs. While we can’t know for sure how many base pairs were in the first living cell created from the so called primordial pool, it is logical to assume 160,000 base pair would be a good guess.

The Earth started out with inorganic chemicals and we know inorganics interact with each other by random means. You pointed out that a grad student in the 50s (Stanley Miller) was able to simulate the formation of nucleotides (A,G,C,T) by mixing gasses and a spark plug. Nucleotides are simple molecules with a few atoms so that does seems plausible. A,G,C,T nucleotides are the building blocks of DNA.

What is implausible is getting 160,000 of these simple molecules to link up in just the right order to make that first living cell work. We know the order of A,G,C,T in a living cell is not just a random mishmash since the DNA sequences in a given species are very similar (something like 99% zippelk?). It’s what makes a species and species.

So what are the odds of a string of A,G,C,T nucleotides linking together in just the right order to create that first living cell with 160,000 base pairs?

Let’s start simple and examine the odds of even getting the first 5 nucleotides in your first DNA to link together in a given pattern. For arguments sake, let’s say the first 5 nucleotides in that original DNA were G-A-C-T-A. To assemble GACTA by random in-organic means, we can start by looking at the odds of the first nucleotide being a G. We have 4 to pick from (AGCT) so the odds are 1 in 4 of getting a G. Next is “A”. The odds of picking an A is again 1 in 4. Same thing with the C, T, and A in this example. So the odds of the code G-A-C-T-A forming by random means is ¼ * ¼ * ¼ * ¼ * ¼ = 1 / 1024 = 1 in 1024. Not great odds, but it would still seem possible. Probably about your odds of winning once in Las Vegas.

The problem though is when you expand this series out to 160,000 base pairs! The general equation for the probability of a particular string of DNA forming is (1/4)^basepairs. That’s 1 chance in 4 to the POWER of your basepair count. As you’ll see that number quickly becomes astronomically high.

What are the odds of even a tiny working 100 base pair pattern forming from your primordial pool? It would be 1 in 4^100. 4^100 = 1.6 E+60. That my friend is a VERY big number. Your odds of winning the MegaMillions lottery is 1 is 175million. The odds of a working 100 base pair sequence forming at random would then be equal to you winning the MegaMillions lottery every week for 2.5 E+49 years (a trillion trillion trillion trillion years)! That is a lot of trillions. Sorry my friend, but that ain’t ever going to happen.

And that’s just the odds of getting a working 100 base pair sequence assembled from a pool. We can’t even compute the odds of getting 160,000 base pairs in order because our computers can’t count numbers than small (or big). It overflows the math capabilities of the computer.

As I’ve said all along, long sequences of working information simply do not assemble themselves on their own without a creator. Denying this is denying mathematics mean anything.

I believed in evolution exactly as it was taught until college. I was a math major, and when I took a cell biology class after some upper level probability classes, I reached the same conclusion that the evolutionary "stories" just didn't stand up to mathematical analysis.

Similar to your post, in the early 80's, Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe published Evolution from Space where they calculated the odds of obtaining the enzymes required for the simplest cell at 1 in 10^40,000. They compared this to the number of atoms in the entire universe: 10^80. In math and physics, anything less than 1 in 10^50 is considered zero.

While I don't agree with Hoyle's contention that life came from elsewhere in space - I think his own math disproves that as well - I can't argue with his conclusion that "The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order."

math gives me a headache, but it's fortunate for the rest of it that some of you guys are so good at it!

Logged

.....The greatest changes occur in their country without their cooperation. They are not even aware of precisely what has taken place. They suspect it; they have heard of the event by chance. More than that, they are unconcerned with the fortunes of their village, the safety of their streets, the fate of their church and its vestry. They think that such things have nothing to do with them, that they belong to a powerful stranger called “the government.” They enjoy these goods as tenants, without a sense of ownership, and never give a thought to how they might be improved.....

Aw Ray, don't go away. We don't have to agree. We can agree to disagree. I don't expect to change your mind and you or Zippelk will never change mine. For the most part this has been civil. I never meant to chase you or anyone else off.

BTW, my head is definitely NOT in the sand. Zippelk has made several statements that I KNOW to be untrue. He doesn't seem to respond to me when I point that out. Someday, in the end, I believe we'll all know the truth. For now, because we really don't know, debating it is somewhat useless. I don't see many minds being changed here but I will stand up for what I know.

"Since you have dismissed my examples of "so called" evolution and asked for "proof" I have to assume that your real agenda is anti-science, and as I have never met anyone who is anti-science for no reason, I assume again that you are religious and attacking science because you think it conflicts with the bible."

Thanks for the reply Zippelk, finally... It's been a great discussion.

Firstly, I want to point out that I am not anti-science at all, nor am I attacking science. I have worked as a scientist for many years. The theory of evolution is just that, a theory. If you're willing to take a look, there is more and more scientific evidence that disproves the theory of evolution.

Secondly, if I have an 'agenda', it is to seek out the truth.

The reason I dismissed your examples is because they're not examples of evolution in the true sense of the word. They are all examples of natural selection. Whilst I agree that they lead to change in gene frequency and expression (which many claim evolution to be), evolution is more than that. Evolution is the theory used to describe the development of humankind from molecules. For this to occur, new information needs to be added to the genome. Natural selection is the process where organisms with certain characteristics are better able to survive under certain selection pressure and this process does not drive the molecules to humankind evolution. It does not have that power since it cannot add new information to the genome.

To make the point clearer of how your examples do not support the theory of evolution, I will go through them one by one.

1. Varroa in bees. In this example, in the presence of varroa, varroa resistant individuals are able to survive and breed whilst those susceptible are not. In this classic example of natural selection, the bees have not evolved at all since varroa resistant bees were present in the first place. All that happens is that varroa susceptible ones are wiped out. In so doing, the genetic diversity contained within the varroa susceptible bees is lost and consequently, from a population perspective, leads to a loss of information in the gene pool, which is the opposite to evolution. The bees started out as bees, still are bees and will continue to be bees. If you could provide evidence that they had evolved into some other kind of creature, a bird or something, then I might believe the theory.

2. Breeds of dogs. There is no doubt that breeds of dogs found today are derived from common ancestry (wild dogs). Again, this is an example of natural selection rather than evolution. Certain traits in dogs are selected against and I agree that it doesn't take a lot of time to create a new breed. In this process, breeders eliminate certain genes and consequently, pure breeds do not have the genetic diversity that the original wild dogs (wolves if you like) had. This also is the exact opposite of evolution.

3. Herbicide resistant crops. Ditto. Plants that are able to withstand herbicide application survive and are used in future breeding. Others that are susceptible die. Obviously, the genetic diversity contained within the herbicide sensitive individuals is lost.

4. Flu mutation. I agree that the flu mutates however this is not an example of evolution either. Mutations never produce new information and only operate on the information that's there. Mutations in viruses result in either horizontal change where the virus changes but has the same amount of genetic information as before or destructive change where the virus has less genetic information. Either way, the result doesn't show how one kind of organism could change into another kind.

5. Peppered moths. This is a great story about a moth that turned into a moth. The original data used to provide evidence for change in the population of the two different moth types was manipulated and is nothing but a fraud. The moths didn't even rest on the bark of trees during the day. Never the less, recent evidence has confirmed changes in the population of the two different colour types since industrialisation which represents natural selection. These moths are still moths and will continue to be moths.

I find it a bit juvenile to buy into the idea that CAPS MEANS YELLING. I use them to emphasize things in my posts. But I find it more juvenile to leave the coffee house because of disagreeing with others in a post or posts.

Typically, such actions discredit the author of the post and specifically in this long winded post it could mean someone through either dozens of hours worth of writing or minutes of cutting and pasting wasted a lot of effort - I draw no conclusions either way.

We do have many learned members and as many passionately expressing their ideas - neither should feel bullied either by content length or numbers on either side of any topic.

I also understand the need to justify a $100k worth of education, if that money went to LIBERAL ARTS we'd likely be arguing or justifying how a can of human feces can sell for a quarter million dollars - seriously???

Just be nice folks. I can see a few people here earning warnings, but since it seems to be airing out the coffee house better than a good Spring breeze, I'm being a bit lax on tightening the thumb-screws on anyone.

But show a bit bit more respect all around, you are all getting your points expressed very concisely, beyond that I don't know what you could expect.

Please enjoy the forum, and if it has helped you in any way, we hope that a small donation can be made to support our FULLY member supported forum. You will never see advertisements here, and that is because of the generous members who have made our forum possible. We are in our second decade as a beekeeping forum and all thanks to member support. At the top right of every page is a donations link. Please help if you can.

Thanks for the feedback. I try to separate topic from content, sounds like the same thing, but it is definitely not. I just like it friendly and love all the opinions and insight I see here.

No matter what someone says, you can glean something from it. I use to listen to Lynn Samuels on WOR-AM NYC for years, a real whacky Liberal that was just fun to listen to and gave me the prospective of the Left. I found a lot of her thinking "out-there" but I could see how she how she believed her views.

Let's face it, we all believe we are right (as in correct) or we would have different views going in, so I never try judging people because I have no clue what go them where they are now. I just have a few paragraphs or in some cases pages to go by, and OFTEN that isn't brought to my attention except by the great mods we have and members. When something comes up tough, I start back-tracking and do my best to resolve any issues.

I like to think of the forum as self-sustaining, but that is a wish, not fact. The members post and that part is amazing, but getting out the sweeper and cleaning up the messes gets back to work and reality.

I give all the credit to our great staff and members, I just enjoy dealing with the BUCK STOPS HERE issues that arise. I want any of you to point fingers toward me when someone disappears that may have thousands of posts and be able to explain "why" if it is something the membership should hear.

I just rest comfortably in the idea that it works out in the end every time. Some people may not always agree and I hope they can understand that there may be things they just don't know. But you've been around a long time and obviously have seen me drag a few members through the coals, not cause it's fun, but because examples must be made - and often there is no better or other way that will set a good example of what we strive for.

Please enjoy the forum, and if it has helped you in any way, we hope that a small donation can be made to support our FULLY member supported forum. You will never see advertisements here, and that is because of the generous members who have made our forum possible. We are in our second decade as a beekeeping forum and all thanks to member support. At the top right of every page is a donations link. Please help if you can.